Was this downvoted just because people disagree? If people are going to do that, they should at least state their reasons for disagreement. I think this is an opinion that needs to be discussed more. Maybe LessWrong isn't the place for it, but more (net) people downvoted this comment than downvoted the main post, and they discuss the same controversial topic, just from different viewpoints. Since yours is not a common opinion, it is more important that people read it because many will not have considered or even heard of this viewpoint before.
Also, I don't think that a lack of a pragmatic plan is a valid argument against pro-lifers. If they were right than difficulty would be no reason not to try to do the right thing.
I think this is an opinion that needs to be discussed more.
Perhaps. But if so, we'd be better off if the comment that introduces it laid out some of the grounds for and implications of holding it.
Simply asserting it as an opinion about parental rights, with no sense of how the author even thinks about how to determine whether something is a right or not beyond a perhaps-relevant vague nod to pragmatism, sets up the discussion to be more fractious than productive.
Actually, having said that: I hadn't downvoted it (I don't downvote much), but having thought about it now, I suppose I ought to. All right, then:
Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged, though that's the subject for another thread. It's an excellent way of advertising whether you are Green or Blue. As a sceptical atheist who thinks guns should be banned and gay marriage should be legalised, I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is less important than another human's right to live.
Wait... that sounds off.
I really am an atheist, with good reasons to support gun bans and gay marriage. But while pondering matters today, I realised that my position on abortion was a lot more shaky than it had previously seemed. I'm not sure one way or the other whether a mother's right to make decisions that can change her life trumps the life of a human embryo or fetus. On the one hand, a fetus isn't quite a person. It has very little intelligence or personality, and no existence independent of its mother, to the point where I am comfortable using the pronoun "it" to describe one. On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life, and I consider preservation of human life a terminal goal as opposed to the intermediate goal that is personal freedom. The relative utilities are staggering: I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point). So: verify my beliefs, LessWrong.
If possible, I'd like this thread to be not only a discussion about abortion and the banning or legalisation thereof, but also about why I didn't notice this before. For all my talk about examining my beliefs, I wasn't doing very well. I only believed verifying my beliefs was good; I wasn't doing it on any lower level.
This post can't go on the front page, for obvious reasons: it's highly inflammatory, and changing it so as not to refer to a particular example would result in one of the posts I linked to above.